5 ms·

The reason is cost, LIDAR is expensive.

by profunctor 1y ago

uoaei 1y ago
That's ok, they're supposed to be. That's no excuse to rush a bad job.
- revnode 1y ago
  The point of engineering is to make something that’s economically viable, not to slap together something that works. Making something that works is easy, making something that works and can be sold at scale is hard.
  - waldarbeiter 1y ago
    If it would be easy there would already be a car costing a few million that few can afford but that has solved AD. But there isn't.
    - revnode 1y ago
      There is no market for such a thing. At that price point, you get a personal chauffeur. That’s what rich people do and he can do stuff that a self driving system never can.
      - tialaramex 1y ago
        And the rich people who don't want a chauffeur like driving the car. They will buy a $10M car no problem, but they want driving that car to be fun because that's what they were paying for. They don't want you to make the driving more automatic and less interesting.
  - uoaei 1y ago
    That's not engineering, that's industry. It's important to distinguish the two.
    - revnode 1y ago
      Engineering only exists within industry. Everything else is a hobby.
      - uoaei 1y ago
        That's simply not true. Engineering can exist outside industry. "Stuff costs money" is not a governing aspect of these kinds of things. FOSS is the obvious counterexample to your absurdly firm stance, but so are many artistic pursuits that use engineering techniques and principles, etc.
        revnode 1y ago
        Industry includes FOSS and artistic endeavors, anything that’s done professionally. My intent was to exclude research efforts, which is fundamentally different from engineering, which is a practical concern and not a “get it to just work” concern.
        uoaei 1y ago
        That's an interesting question, the question of whether engineering per se is strictly pragmatic. I personally think drawing a hard line between research and engineering is a misstep and relies too heavily on a bureaucratic kind of metaphysics.
kibwen 1y ago
This information is out of date. LIDAR costs are 10x less than they were a decade ago, and still falling. Turns out, when there's demand for LIDAR in this form factor, people invest in R&D to drive costs down and set up manufacturing facilities to achieve economies of scale. Wow, who could have predicted this‽
throwaway31131 1y ago
Cost is relative. LIDAR maybe be expensive relative to a camera or two but it’s very inexpensive compared to hiring a full time driver. Crashes aren’t particularly cheap either. Neither are insurance premiums.
DennisP 1y ago
Huawei has a self-driving system that uses three lidars, which cost $250 each (plus vision, radar, and ultrasound). It appears to work about as well as FSD. Here's the Out of Spec guys riding around on it in China for an hour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuDSz06BT2g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuDSz06BT2g
- mensetmanusman 1y ago
  Huawei received over $1 billion in grants from the Chinese government in 2023. Western countries might not be smart enough to keep R&D because Wall Street sees it as a cost center.
  - DennisP 1y ago
    Tesla spent about $10 billion on AI training hardware in 2024.[1] They just might not be getting as much bang for the buck, due to their paucity of sensors. Huawei get similar performance without Tesla's four billion miles of training data. [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/elon-musk-spent-roughly-usd10-billion-on-ai-training-hardware-in-2024 https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
ModernMech 1y ago
You know what used to be expensive? Cameras. Then people started manufacturing them for mass market and cost when down. You know what else used to be expensive? Structured light sensors. They cost $$$$ in 2009. Then Microsoft started manufacturing the Kinect for a mass market, and in 2010 price went down to $150. You know what's happened to LIDAR in the past decade? You guessed it, costs have come massively down because car manufacturers started buying more, and costs will continue to come down as they reach mass market adoption. The prohibitive cost for LIDAR coming down was always just a matter of time. A "visionary" like Musk should have been able to see that. Instead he thought he could outsmart everyone by using a technology that was not suited for the job, but he made the wrong bet.
- jqpabc123 1y ago
  but he made the wrong bet. This should be expected when someone who is *not* an experienced engineer starts making engineering decisions.
zbrozek 1y ago
It's not 2010 anymore. They will asymptotically reach approximately twice the price of a camera, since they need both a transmit and receive optical path. Right now the cheapest of the good LiDARs are around 3-4x that. So we're getting close, and we're already within the realm large-scale commercial viability.

The reason is cost, LIDAR is expensive.

uoaei 1y ago

That's ok, they're supposed to be. That's no excuse to rush a bad job.

revnode 1y ago
The point of engineering is to make something that’s economically viable, not to slap together something that works. Making something that works is easy, making something that works and can be sold at scale is hard.
- waldarbeiter 1y ago
  If it would be easy there would already be a car costing a few million that few can afford but that has solved AD. But there isn't.
  - revnode 1y ago
    There is no market for such a thing. At that price point, you get a personal chauffeur. That’s what rich people do and he can do stuff that a self driving system never can.
    - tialaramex 1y ago
      And the rich people who don't want a chauffeur like driving the car. They will buy a $10M car no problem, but they want driving that car to be fun because that's what they were paying for. They don't want you to make the driving more automatic and less interesting.
- uoaei 1y ago
  That's not engineering, that's industry. It's important to distinguish the two.
  - revnode 1y ago
    Engineering only exists within industry. Everything else is a hobby.
    - uoaei 1y ago
      That's simply not true. Engineering can exist outside industry. "Stuff costs money" is not a governing aspect of these kinds of things. FOSS is the obvious counterexample to your absurdly firm stance, but so are many artistic pursuits that use engineering techniques and principles, etc.
      - revnode 1y ago
        Industry includes FOSS and artistic endeavors, anything that’s done professionally. My intent was to exclude research efforts, which is fundamentally different from engineering, which is a practical concern and not a “get it to just work” concern.
        uoaei 1y ago
        That's an interesting question, the question of whether engineering per se is strictly pragmatic. I personally think drawing a hard line between research and engineering is a misstep and relies too heavily on a bureaucratic kind of metaphysics.

kibwen 1y ago

This information is out of date. LIDAR costs are 10x less than they were a decade ago, and still falling. Turns out, when there's demand for LIDAR in this form factor, people invest in R&D to drive costs down and set up manufacturing facilities to achieve economies of scale. Wow, who could have predicted this‽

throwaway31131 1y ago

Cost is relative. LIDAR maybe be expensive relative to a camera or two but it’s very inexpensive compared to hiring a full time driver. Crashes aren’t particularly cheap either. Neither are insurance premiums.

DennisP 1y ago

Huawei has a self-driving system that uses three lidars, which cost $250 each (plus vision, radar, and ultrasound). It appears to work about as well as FSD. Here's the Out of Spec guys riding around on it in China for an hour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuDSz06BT2g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuDSz06BT2g

mensetmanusman 1y ago
Huawei received over $1 billion in grants from the Chinese government in 2023. Western countries might not be smart enough to keep R&D because Wall Street sees it as a cost center.
- DennisP 1y ago
  Tesla spent about $10 billion on AI training hardware in 2024.[1] They just might not be getting as much bang for the buck, due to their paucity of sensors. Huawei get similar performance without Tesla's four billion miles of training data. [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/elon-musk-spent-roughly-usd10-billion-on-ai-training-hardware-in-2024 https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

ModernMech 1y ago

You know what used to be expensive? Cameras. Then people started manufacturing them for mass market and cost when down. You know what else used to be expensive? Structured light sensors. They cost $$$$ in 2009. Then Microsoft started manufacturing the Kinect for a mass market, and in 2010 price went down to $150. You know what's happened to LIDAR in the past decade? You guessed it, costs have come massively down because car manufacturers started buying more, and costs will continue to come down as they reach mass market adoption. The prohibitive cost for LIDAR coming down was always just a matter of time. A "visionary" like Musk should have been able to see that. Instead he thought he could outsmart everyone by using a technology that was not suited for the job, but he made the wrong bet.

jqpabc123 1y ago
but he made the wrong bet. This should be expected when someone who is *not* an experienced engineer starts making engineering decisions.

zbrozek 1y ago

It's not 2010 anymore. They will asymptotically reach approximately twice the price of a camera, since they need both a transmit and receive optical path. Right now the cheapest of the good LiDARs are around 3-4x that. So we're getting close, and we're already within the realm large-scale commercial viability.