10 ms·
Lidars come down in price ~40x. https://cleantechnica.com/2025/03/20/lidars-wicked-cost-drop/amp/ https://cleantechnica.com/2025/03/20/lidars-wicked-cost-drop.
by AnotherGoodName 9mo ago
Lidars come down in price ~40x.
https://cleantechnica.com/2025/03/20/lidars-wicked-cost-drop/amp/ https://cleantechnica.com/2025/03/20/lidars-wicked-cost-drop...
Meanwhile visible light based tech is going up in price due to competing with ai on the extra gpu need while lidar gets the range/depth side of things for free.
Ideally cars use both but if you had to choose one or the other for cost you’d be insane to choose vision over lidar. Musk made an ill timed decision to go vision only.
So it’s not a surprise to see the low end models with lidar.
- Tempest1981 9mo agoCould it also be about the looks? Waymo has a rather industrial look, with so many LiDARs, and the roof turret.
- golemiprague 9mo agoSome companies work on reducing the size of it so manufacturers will be able to put it inside the car behind the mirror. Innoviz is one example https://techtime.news/2025/11/14/innoviz-27/ https://techtime.news/2025/11/14/innoviz-27/
- refulgentis 9mo ago^ this, the article is quoting LIDAR price ($25K) from years ago.
- DustinBrett 9mo agoShow the cost differences and do the math then come back to us before you can suggest what decisions were ill timed. Otherwise it's just armchair engineering.
- refulgentis 9mo agoI'd love to take on this challenge: the article they linked shows the cost add for LIDAR (+$130) -- -- but I'm not sure how to get data on ex. how much Tesla is charged for a Nvidia whatever or what compute Waymo has -- My personal take is Waymo uses cameras too so maybe we have to assume the worst case, +full cost of lidar / +$130
- iknowstuff 9mo agoTesla uses their own chips. Chips which you can’t skip by using lidar because you still need to make decisions based on vision. A sparse distance cloud is not enough
- kadoban 9mo agoIn what sense does Tesla use their own chips?
- DustinBrett 9mo agoLet me Google that for you?
- kadoban 9mo agoThey have no fabs. They're using nvidia chips on server side last I checked, and what tsmc thei own design for in car? Those aren't cheap anyway. The markup on nvidia chips is high, but it's not _that_ high.
- DustinBrett 9mo agoIf they design the chip it is theirs. If you are saying fabs then nearly nobody has their own chips. But they plan to make fabs too.
- iknowstuff 9mo agoBy that logic, nvidia also doesnt have chips lol
- terminalshort 9mo agoThe issue isn't just the cost of the lidar units off the shelf. You have to install the sensors on the car. Modifications like that at the scale that Waymo does them (they still have less than 10K cars) are not automated and probably cost almost as much as the price of the car itself. BYD is getting around this by including them in a mass produced car, so their cost per unit is closer to the $130 off the shelf price. This is the winning combination IMO.
- RivieraKid 9mo agoDepends on the specific lidar model. It seems that there's a wide range of lidar prices and capabilities and it's hard to find pricing info.
- dzhiurgis 9mo agoCan lidar say what colour is traffic light?
- pyrolistical 9mo agoIt’s not either lifar or regular cameras. Use both and combine the information to exceed the humans
- dzhiurgis 9mo agoWhat proportion is camera data and what is LIDAR? Must be solved problem and something you should buy already? Right?
- jenebiiit 9mo ago[dead]
- comfysocks 9mo agoMost practical navigation systems employ some form of sensor fusion. It’s more the norm than not. I’m sure even Tesla’s FSD does too for fusing vision, inertial sensors, wheel speed, multiple etc.
- Gibbon1 9mo agoSomething I've seen noises about is time of flight systems for traffic. I think the idea is you can put those systems on traffic lights, cars, bicycles, and pedestrians and then cars can know where those things are.
- mrtksn 9mo agoI wonder if ubiquity doesn’t effect the lidar performance? Wouldn’t the systems see each other’s laser projections if there are multiple cars close to each other? Also is LIDAR immune to other issues like bright 3rd party sources? At least on iPhone I’m having faceid performance degradation. Also, I suspect other issues like thin or transparent objects net being detected. With vision you rely on external source or flood light. Its also how our civilization is designed to function in first place. Anyway, the whole self driving obsession is ridiculous because being driven around in a bad traffic isn’t that much better than driving in bad traffic. It’s cool but can’t beat a the public infrastructure since you can’t make the car dissipated when not in use. IMHO, connectivity to simulate public transport can be the real sweet spot, regardless of sensor types. Coordinated cars can solve traffic and pretend to be trains.
- Philip-J-Fry 9mo agoI'd assume not since Waymo uses lidar and has entire depots of them driving around in close proximity when not in use.
- quietsegfault 9mo agoLIDAR systems use timing, phase locking, and software filtering to identify and eliminate interference from other units. There is still risk of interference, resulting in reduced range, noise, etc.
- rafabulsing 9mo agoI'm not a self-driving believer (never had the opportunity to try it, actually), but I'd say bad traffic would be the number one case where I'd want it. I don't mind highway driving, or city driving if traffic is good, but stop and go traffic is torture to me. I'd much rather just be on my phone, or read a book or something. Agreed that public transportation is usually the best option in either case, though.
- analog31 9mo agoUnfortunately in my region highway traffic is quite congested, and so called "adaptive cruise control" is a game changer. I find it reduces fatigue by a lot. Usually the trucks are all cruising at the speed limit and I just hang with them. I only change lanes if they slow down or there's an obstruction etc.
- JumpCrisscross 9mo agoBetween anti-Musk sentiment, competition in self driving and the proven track record of Lidar, I think we’ll start seeing jurisdictions from Europe to New York and California banning camera-only self-driving beyond Level 3.
- general1465 9mo agoNah, you don't need to ban anything. Just force the rule, that if company sells self driving, they are also taking full liability for any damages of this system.
- kelipso 9mo agoWhy is it preferable to wait for people to die and then sue the company instead of banning it in the first place?
- JBlue42 9mo agoThis doc from 1999 has an answer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiB8GVMNJkE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiB8GVMNJkE
- cyanydeez 9mo agoUsually its capitalism, because in America, they can just buy carveouts after the fact.
- tim333 9mo agoThey don't have to die first. The company can avoid the expense by planning how not to kill people. If you charged car makers $20m per pedestrian killed by their cars regardless of fault you'd probably see much safer designs.
- stirfish 9mo ago> They don't have to die first. The company can avoid the expense by planning how not to kill people. This is an extremely optimistic view on how companies work
- mft_ 9mo agoGiven a good proportion of his success has rested on somehow simplifying or commodifying existing expensive technology (e.g. rockets, and lots of the technology needed to make them; EV batteries) it's surprising that Musk's response to lidar being (at the time) very expensive was to avoid it despite the additional challenges that this brought, rather than attempt to carve a moat by innovating and creating cheaper and better lidar. > So it’s not a surprise to see the low end models with lidar. They could be going for a Tesla-esque approach, in that by equipping every car in the fleet with lidar, they maximise the data captured to help train their models.
- spiderfarmer 9mo agoThe ways in which Musk dug himself in when experts predicted this exact scenario confirmed to me he was not as smart as some people think he was. He seemed to have drank his own koolaid back then. And if he still doesn’t realize and admit he is wrong then he is just plain dumb. Pride is standing in the way of first principles.
- d_luaz 9mo agoWill there be major difference in ride experience when you take a Waymo vs Robotaxi?
- tstrimple 9mo agoConsidering one requires a human babysitter and one doesn’t on top of the accident rates between them it should be an easy yes.
- d_luaz 9mo agoFair. So in a sense, the lidar vs camera argument ultimately can be publicly assess/proven through human babysitter (regulation permit) and accident rates. or maybe user adoptions.
- TOMDM 9mo agoMusk has for a long time now been convinced that all problems in this space are solvable via vision. Same deal with his comments about how all anti-air military capability will be dominated by optical sensors.
- cameronh90 9mo agoIf you have to choose one over the other, it has to be vision surely? Even ignoring various current issues with Lidar systems that aren’t fundamental limitations, large amounts of road infrastructure is just designed around vision and will continue to be for at least another few decades. Lidar just fundamentally can’t read signs, traffic lights or road markings in a reliable way. Personally I don’t buy the argument that it has to be one or the other as Tesla have claimed, but between the two, vision is the only one that captures all the data sufficient to drive a car.
- gbnwl 9mo agoSorry if this is obvious, but are there actually any systems that "choose one over the other"? My impression's always been it was either vision + LIDAR, or vision alone. Are there any examples of LIDAR alone?
- ares623 9mo agoRoombas
- pests 9mo agoI don't think they would be as well accepted into peoples homes if they had a mobile camera on it. Didn't they already leak peoples home mappings?
- sampo 9mo agoRoomba (specifically the brand of the American company iRobot) only added lidar in 2025 [1]. Earliest Roombas navigated by touch (bumping into walls), and then by cameras. But if you use "roomba" as a generic term for robot vacuum then yes, Chinese Ecovacs and Xiaomi introduced lidar-based robot vacuums in 2015 [2]. [1] https://www.theverge.com/news/627751/irobot-launches-eight-new-roombas-with-lidar-room-mapping https://www.theverge.com/news/627751/irobot-launches-eight-n... [2] https://english.cw.com.tw/article/article.action?id=4542 https://english.cw.com.tw/article/article.action?id=4542
- pkulak 9mo agoI hate the guy, but I get the decision. A point cloud has a ceiling that the visible spectrum doesn’t, evidenced by our lack of lidar.
- jg0r3 9mo agoIt's because stereo vision is "cheap" to implement, not because theoretical biological lidar has a "ceiling".
- pkulak 9mo agoThere’s no such thing as biological LiDAR.
- comfysocks 9mo agoYes lidar has limitations, but so does machine vision. That’s why you want both if you can have it. LIDAR is more reliable at judging distance than stereo vision. Stereo vision requires there to be sufficient texture (features) to work. It can be thrown off by fog or glare. A white semi trailer can be a degenerate case. It can be fooled by optical illusions. Yes, humans don’t have built in lidar. But humans do use tools to augment their capabilities. The car itself is one example. Birds don’t have jet engines, props, or rotors… should we not use those?
- dham 9mo ago> choose vision over lidar I mean, you have to have vision to drive. What are you getting at? You can't have a lidar only autonomous vehicle.
- schiffern 9mo ago>Lidars come down in price ~40x. Is that really true? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Ars cites this China Daily article[0], which gives no specifics and simply states: >A LiDAR unit, for instance, used to cost 30,000 yuan (about $4,100), but now it costs only around 1,000 yuan (about $138) — a dramatic decrease, said Li. How good are these $138 LiDARs? Who knows, because this article gives no information. This article[1] from around the same time gives more specifics, listing under "1000 yuan LiDARs" the RoboSense MX, Hesai Technology ATX, Zvision Technologies ZVISION EZ5, and the VanJee Technology WLR-760. The RoboSense MX is selling for $2,000-3,000, so it's not exactly $138. It was going to be added to XPENG cars, before they switched away from LiDAR. Yikes. The ATX is $1400, the EZ5 isn't available, and the WLR-760 is $3500. So the press release claims of sub-$200 never really materialized. Furthermore, all of these are low beam count LiDARs with a limited FOV. These are 120°x20°, whereas Waymo sensors cover 360°x95° (and it still needs 4 of them). It seems my initial skepticism was well placed. >if you had to choose one or the other for cost you’d be insane to choose vision over lidar Good luck with that. LiDAR can't read signs. [0] https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202503/06/WS67c92b5ca310c240449d90b4.html https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202503/06/WS67c92b5ca310c... [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-beijing-international-automotive-sensor-082300183.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-beijing-international-a...
- fuzzythinker 9mo agoIt wasn't ill timed. Any sane leader would understand both size and cost of tech always comes down rather quickly over time. He's just refused to accept having lidar uglify his cars or wait for it to get smaller. He instead fabricates about humans don't have lidars so cars shouldn't have them and sold "no lidars on Teslas" as an advantage instead of the opposite and refuses to accept the truth due to needing to feed his ego. Firing all non-yesmen didn't help either.
- ndsipa_pomu 9mo agoThat always struck me as a weak argument. Humans don't have wheels, so maybe he should have designed cars without wheels too.
- schiffern 9mo agoThat strikes me as a weak argument. We have vehicles with legs, but wheels are just better, practically speaking. The argument is that humans provide a proof-of-concept that vision + neural net can drive a car, because (for some reason) some people doubt this is possible. However there's no need for a "proof of concept" that mechanical legs can be built, because everyone already know that building mechanical legs is possible.
- ndsipa_pomu 9mo agoSimilarly, vehicles using cameras and lidar are just better, practically speaking.
- schiffern 9mo agoMaybe, but those claims have yet to be shown in the real world. Waymo has certainly had its share of issues lately on the "practicality" axis. The cost of (actually good enough) LiDAR hardware doesn't help practicality either.
- 9mo ago
- ACCount37 9mo agoWhat "extra GPU"? LIDAR is also straight up worthless without an unholy machine learning pipeline to massage its raw data into actual decisions. Self-driving is an AI problem, not a sensor problem - you aren't getting away from AI no matter what you do.