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It's almost entirely a product/economic gamble. Basically: "How do we get self-driving into millions of regular consumer cars without doubling the price by add
by dmix 1y ago
It's almost entirely a product/economic gamble. Basically:
"How do we get self-driving into millions of regular consumer cars without doubling the price by adding expensive sensors and redesigning the vehicle around huge chunky sensors"
Waymo is focused on Taxis for a reason because it's likely going to be unaffordable, except to people driving Lambos. But that also may be fine for a big chunk of the public who don't want to own cars (or want to rent their own as a service).
Some consumer car companies are experimenting with adding smaller LIDAR sensors like recent Volvo Ex90 which costs ~$100k. But they aren't as sophisticated as Waymo
- senordevnyc 1y agoIs LIDAR full of unobtainium? Is there some fundamental first-principles reason that the cost of LIDAR can't go down by orders of magnitude? Isn't that kind of reasoning from first principles what Elon's genius was supposed to be about, like with cost of accessing space? But apparently he thinks a spinning laser is always going to cost six figures?
- dmix 1y agoNo you are right, the economics of LIDAR could turn out to be insignificant over another decade of serious manufacturing investment in China. But Elon is a naive tech optimist like many of us engineers, so 5-6yrs ago he played the risky hand hoping that vision only would work out if they invested hard into it. Back then Comma AI did the same thing choosing cheap cameras, Geohot the founder is similar to Elon being someone who prefers bucking trends and taking risks. He made a good public argument around that time for using Cameras and betting on more data = better output. And I guess Elon thought so too. It also happened to involve less hardware engineering and let them focus on software. Which is an easier decision as a business. If it doesn’t work out I’m sure it will die a quick death and LIDAR will take over. State regulators won’t tolerate it long.