8 ms·

Since lidar has distance information and cameras do not, it was always a ridiculous idea by a certain company to use cameras only. Lidar using cars are going to

• FrustratedMonky 8mo ago
  It was cost wasn't it? If this lowers Lidar costs, and Tesla has spent all this time refining the camara technology. Now have both. Use both.
• wasmainiac 8mo ago
  Just say Tesla, why censor yourself.
  • zelphirkalt 8mo ago
    I have a suspicion here on HN. When criticizing big tech, especially Google and FB, at a certain time of the day a specific cohort comes online and downvotes. Suspiciously, that is a time when one could conclude, that now people in the US start working or come online. Either fanboys, employees or an organized group of users trying to silence big tech criticism. I have no proof of course and it might be coincidence, or just difference of mindset between US citizens and Europe citizens. It happened a few times already and to me looks sus. But if they actually read and not just ctrl+f <company name>, then of course not writing the company name, but hinting at it in an obvious way is no more helpful either.
    • throwa356262 8mo ago
      I have seen this happening multiple times, some to fairly reasonable comments with a just tiny negative tone. There is also flagging abuse which effectively kills the comment /post.
    • sergiotapia 8mo ago
      It's been my experience that hn and reddit have a very high overlap in audience these days. The jerrybreakseverything crowd. Anything anti-tesla, anti-grok, is applauded.
      • ImPostingOnHN 8mo ago
        Yeah, I agree with GP, pretty much anything that isn't effusively praising tesla or elmu etc will tend to get reflexively downvoted.
    • simpss 8mo ago
      I know for a fact at least 1 bigger US company has a bot in slack that brings up any mentions of $companyname on hackernews...
• galangalalgol 8mo ago
  The reasoning is cynical but sound. If the system uses only the sensing modes people have, it will make the mistakes people do. If a jury thinks "well I could have done that either!" You win. It doesn't matter if your system has fewer accidents if some of the failure modes are different than human ones, because the jury will think "how could it not figure that out?"
  • estearum 8mo ago
    I don't think that's the reasoning. The reasoning was simply that LIDAR was (and incorrectly predicted to always be) significantly more expensive than cameras, and hypothetically that should be fine because, well, humans drive with only two eyes. Musk miscalculated on 1) cost reduction in LIDAR and 2) how incredible the human brain is compared to computers. Having similar sensors certainly doesn't guarantee your accidents look the same, so I don't think your logic is even internally sound.
    • szundi 8mo ago
      Seeing the SOTA in FSD techs it is not obvious that Musk made a miscalc so far.
      • estearum 8mo ago
        Nah If the data were positive for Tesla, Tesla would publish it They do not, so one can infer it is not flattering (Before you post the "Miles driven with FSD" chart, you should know upfront (as Tesla must) that chart doesn't normalize by age of vehicle or driving conditions and is therefore meaningless/presumably designed to deceive)
    • cyanydeez 8mo ago
      There certainly is a pretty on going miscalculation regarding human intelligence, and consrquentially, empathy.
    • mytailorisrich 8mo ago
      IMHO not using lidars sounds like a premature optimisation and a complication, with a level of hubris. This is a difficult problem to solve and perhaps a pragmatic approach was/is to make your life as simple as possible to help get to a fully working solution, even if more expensive, then you can improve cost and optimise.
• spyder 8mo ago
  Yea, even in the case they could match human level stereo depth perception with AI, why would they say "no" to superhuman lidar capabilities. Cost could be a somewhat acceptable answer if there wouldn't be problems with the camera only approach but there are still examples of silly failures of it. And if I remember correctly they also removed their other superhuman radar in their newer models, the one which in certain conditions was capable of sensing multiple cars ahead by bouncing the signal below other cars.
  • peterfirefly 8mo ago
    Because they don't have superhuman LIDAR. They never did. Nobody ever did. LIDAR input is not completely reliable so what do you do then?
    • MengerSponge 8mo ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensor_fusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensor_fusion
      • peterfirefly 8mo ago
        Not the great answer you think it is.
• Someone 8mo ago
  > Since lidar has distance information and cameras do not, it was always a ridiculous idea by a certain company to use cameras only Human eyes do not have distance information, either, but derive it well enough from spatial (by ‘comparing’ inputs from 2 eyes) or temporal parallax (by ‘comparing’ inputs from one eye at different points in time) to drive cars. One can also argue that detecting absolute distance isn’t necessary to drive a car. Time to-contact may be more useful. Even only detecting “change in bearing” can be sufficient to avoid collision (https://eoceanic.com/sailing/tips/27/179/how_to_tell_if_you_are_on_a_collision_course_with_another_vessel/ https://eoceanic.com/sailing/tips/27/179/how_to_tell_if_you_...) Having said that, LiDAR works better than vision in mild fog, and if it’s possible to add a decent absolute distance sensor for little extra cost, why wouldn’t you?
  • dumbfounder 8mo ago
    I don’t like the comparison between humans and humans. Humans don’t travel around at 100mph in packs of other humans. Why not use every sensor type at our disposal if it gives us more info to make decisions? Yes I understand it’s more complicated, but we figure stuff out.
  • larsnystrom 8mo ago
    Human eyes are much better than cameras at dealing with dynamic range. They’re also attached to a super-computer which has been continuously trained for many years to determine distances and classify objects.
  • idiotsecant 8mo ago
    Let me know when you have a camera package with human eye equivalency.
  • tsimionescu 8mo ago
    Human/animal vision uses way more than parallax to judge distances and bearings - it uses a world model that evolved over millions of years to model the environment. That's why we can get excellent 3D images from a 2D screen, and also why our depth perception can be easily tricked with objects of unexpected size. Put a human or animal in an abstract environment with no shadows and no familiar objects, and you'll see that depth perception based solely on parallax is actually very bad.
• nlitened 8mo ago
  As I understand, lidars don't work well in rain/snow/fog. So in the real world, where you have limited resources (research and production investment, people talent, AI training time and dataset breadth, power consumption) that you could redistribute between two systems (vision and lidar), but one of the systems would contradict the other in dangerous driving conditions — it's smarter to just max out vision and ignore lidar altogether.
  • zemvpferreira 8mo ago
    Limited resources? Billions per year are being thrown at the base technology. We have the capital deployed to exhaust every path ten times over.
    • nlitened 8mo ago
      Even if so, it doesn't mean that capital deployment efficiency and expected payoff make equal sense in all directions. Then again, it's good that we have self-driving companies with lidar and without — we will find out which approach wins.
      • kikki 8mo ago
        We have already found out, Waymo is SAE Level 4, Tesla is SAE Level 2
  • heisenbit 8mo ago
    The Swiss cheese model would like to disagree.
  • RobotToaster 8mo ago
    > lidars don't work well in rain/snow/fog. Neither do cameras, or eyeballs.
    • dsr_ 8mo ago
      When it's not safe to drive, it's not safe to drive. I've been in zero-road-speed whiteout conditions several times. The only move to make is to the side of the road without getting stuck, and turning on your flashers. Low-light cameras would not have worked. Sonar would not have worked. Infrared would not have worked.
• mgoetzke 8mo ago
  considering cameras can create reliable enough distance measurements AND also handle all the color reception needed for legally driving roads it was always a ridiculous idea by a certain set of people that lidar is necessary.
  • tsimionescu 8mo ago
    No, cameras cannot create reliable distance measurements in real-world conditions. Parallax is not a great way to measure distance for fast, unpredictably moving objects (such as cars on the road). And dirt or misalignment can significantly reduce accuracy compared to lab conditions. Note that humans do not rely strictly on our eyes as cameras to measure distances. There is a huge amount of inference about the world based on our internal world models that goes into vision. For example, if you put is in a false-perspective or otherwise highly artifical environment, our visual acuity goes down significantly; conversely, people with a single eye (so no parallax-based measurement ability) still have quite decent depth perception compared to what you'd naively expect. Not to mention, our eyes are kept very clean, and maintain their alignment to a very high degree of precision.
    • s08148692 8mo ago
      I don't think they meant literally cameras only can create reliable distance measures. At the risk of putting words in their mouth, I would guess they meant "cameras as the only input to a distance model". the "model" doing all the heavy lifting, covering the points that you quite rightly point out are needed Several companies, most notably Tesla, have done this well enough to drive in all manner of traffic. I'm not going to comment about if lidar is strictly needed or not to achieve better-than-human safety, that's yet to be proven one way or another by anyone. The point is that cameras + local inference can do a pretty good job at distance estimation
  • throwa356262 8mo ago
    There are tons of evidence showing that cameras are alone are not safe enough and even Tesla has realized that removing lidar to save cost was a mistake.
  • 8mo ago
• SecretDreams 8mo ago
  I'll preface by saying lidar should be used with autonomous vehicles. Individual cameras don't have distance information, but you can easily calibrate a system of cameras to give you distance information. Your eyes do this already, albeit not quantitatively. The quantitative part comes from math our brains aren't setup to do in real time.
• radial_symmetry 8mo ago
  I'm not an expert on ML vision, but I do have a Tesla and it seems to be able to tell how far away things are just fine. I'm not sure what would be wrong with the vision system that lidar needs to fix.
  • tw04 8mo ago
    The phantom braking issue with auto pilot tells me it can’t. A shadow from a tree doesn’t trigger your brakes locking up at 70+ mph when there’s a lidar sensor to tell you it’s not a physical object. “Just buy FSD” isn’t a reasonable answer to a problem literally no other automaker suffers from.
    • ubercore 8mo ago
      Stopped using autopilot because of the phantom braking. It's also recently gotten much worse at lane departure sensing, often confused by snow or slightly faded road markers. Not pleasant to have the alarms go off while calmly and safely driving.
  • Phil_Latio 8mo ago
    Yeah it's BS. Tesla uses lidar where it makes sense: They have a small lidar fleet to collect ground truth depth data for better vision estimation. This part is long solved.
  • xpe 8mo ago
    > I'm not sure what would be wrong with the vision system that lidar needs to fix. This conversational disconnect is as old as the hills: 1. Person 1 asks "what's wrong" (if it ain't broke don't fix it) 2. Person 2 wants to make something better My meta-goal here on HN (and many places where people converse) is for people to step back and recognize the conversational context and not fall into the predictable patterns that prevent us from making sense of the world as best as we can.
  • DustinBrett 8mo ago
    Luckily everyone else in the comments is an expert. And also doesn't recognize that Tesla's already drive themselves and did not need Lidar. They also mischaracterize the reasoning.
• bko 8mo ago
  Why make things more complicated than they need to be? Humans don't have lidar and we are the only intelligence that can reliably drive. Lidar just seems like feature engineering, which has proven to be a dead end in most other AI applications (bitter lesson). https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~eunsol/courses/data/bitter_lesson.pdf https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~eunsol/courses/data/bitter_lesson...
  • afavour 8mo ago
    Self driving cars are not equipped with human brains so this doesn’t really make sense. “We should achieve self driving cars via replicating the human brain” strikes me as an incredibly inefficient and difficult way to solve the problem.
    • sebastos 8mo ago
      Then you deeply underestimate how difficult the problem is, and deeply misunderstand where all the effort has been spent in developing autonomous vehicles.
      • afavour 8mo ago
        If all the effort has been spent in trying to replicate the human brain then I am comfortable saying that is a mistake. We have a tool that can tell with great accuracy how far away an object is. The suggestion that we should ignore it and rely on cameras that have to guess it because “that’s how humans work” is absurd, frankly.
        • sebastos 8mo ago
          Before you can learn how far away an object is, you must decide: which laser return corresponds to which object? In fact, what counts as an object? Where does a tree stop and become a fallen tree branch? Is that object moving towards me? Is the apparent velocity of this point represent the fact that the object is moving, or that it's rotating, or that it's flexing, or dividing, or all 4? Is that object moving towards me but that's ok because it's a car that's going to stay in its lane? What's a lane? What's my laser return for where the lane is? Should I stop at this intersection? What's my laser return for whether the light is red? Am I in the blind spot of the car in front of me? Is he about to shift into my lane because he doesn't see me? What laser return do I get to tell me whether his indicator is on? The problem of understanding what is happening in front of you while driving is preposterously more complicated than just a point cloud of distances. That is .01% of the problem. To solve the remaining 99.99%, you need interpretation of photons and sound waves into a semantic understanding that gives you predictive power to guess how the physical world will evolve and avoid breaking the rules of the road. Show me a mechanized way of understanding the causes of how the physical structure of the world is about to evolve, and I'll show you something that is imitating a human brain, however poorly. The cameras give you _plenty_ of data to determine 3D structure, at a higher resolution than the laser, without being emissive, for cheaper. It's a completely reasonable approach to focus your limited computational hardware on interpreting the data you have instead of adding more modalities with their own limitations that (according to nature) are demonstrably unnecessary. The world is more complicated than slogans and pitchforks and Elon Bad.
• foooorsyth 8mo ago
  I wouldn’t take too much issue with the “cameras are enough” claim if cameras actually performed like eyes. Human eyes have high dynamic range and continuous autofocus performance that no camera can match. They also have lids with eyelashes that can dynamically block light and assist with aperture adjustment. The appeal to human biology and argument against fusion between disparate sensors kinda falls flat when you’re building a world model by fusing feeds from cameras all around the car. Humans don’t have 8 eyes in a 360 array around their head. What they do have is two eyes (super cameras) on ~180 degree swiveling and ~180 degree tilting gimbal. With mics attached that help sense other vehicles via road noise. And equilibrioception, vibration detection, and more all in the same system, all fused. If someone were actually building this system to drive the car, the argument based on “how did you drive here today?” gets a lot stronger. One time I had some water blocking my ear and I drove myself to the hospital to get it fixed. That was a shockingly scary drive — your hearing is doing a lot of sensing while driving that you don’t value until it’s gone.
• MetaWhirledPeas 8mo ago
  I find it comical that people continue to go back to this rage well against "a certain company" for their vision-only approach when the truth is they have the best automatic driving system an individual can buy, rivaling Waymo and beating the Chinese brands. Why are the commenters not pissed at the dozens of other car companies who have done absolutely nothing in this space? Answer: because it's not nearly as fun to be pissed at Kia or Mercedes or whoever. Clearly they are just enjoying the shared anger, regardless of whether it is justified.
  • superxpro12 8mo ago
    There is certainly some truth that "some company" overpromised and underdelivered. They advertise "full self driving" but then hide in the fine-print that "oh jk, not really, but its still full self driving if anyone asks ;) ;) ;)" I think the frustration stems from the obvious falsehoods in the advertising, and the doubling-down on the tech, despite the well-documented weaknesses of the implementation.
    • taylortrusty 8mo ago
      Have you driven in Tesla FSD recently? If anything it’s undersold. It’s an absolute miracle. I use it everyday.
      • bicepjai 8mo ago
        Please be courteous to other drivers on the road, we all share it. Just make sure you’re the one in charge, not the software. This isn’t to put your argument down, but to offer the perspective of people involved in accidents. Loss of life is bad, but surviving accidents is also equally bad.
  • array_key_first 8mo ago
    1. Tesla is not competitive with Waymo, they're not even in the same class. Waymo is 10 years ahead at least. I understand you can't buy a Waymo, but still. 2. Other car companies are properly valued, Tesla is overinflated. 3. Other cars, even basic Hondas, have the same level of self driving as Teslas. 4. Other car companies don't lie to their customers about their capabilities or what they're buying.
• nova22033 8mo ago
  It's not complicated. LIDAR hardware was in short supply during COVID. Elon obviously couldn't slow down production and sink the inflated stock price.
  • jollyllama 8mo ago
    WTF was their calculus on the break-even liability point? The "if we do this, we save X amount of money, but stand to lose Y in lawsuits for cases where the usage of LIDAR could have otherwise prevented it."
  • Phil_Latio 8mo ago
    April 2019: https://www.youtube.com/live/Ucp0TTmvqOE?t=9220s https://www.youtube.com/live/Ucp0TTmvqOE?t=9220s There are probably even earlier statements from him against lidar...
• runjake 8mo ago
  Karpathy provided additional context on the removal of LiDAR during his Lex Fridman Podcast appearance. This article condenses what he said: https://archive.is/PPiVG https://archive.is/PPiVG And here's one of Elon's mentions (he also has talked about it quite a bit in various spots). https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1959831831668228450?s=20 https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1959831831668228450?s=20 Edit: My personal view is that LiDAR and other sensors are extremely useful, but I worked on aircraft, not cars.
  • willio58 8mo ago
    Based on that list it boils down to 2 things it seems: - cost (no longer a problem) - too much code needed and it bloats the data pipelines. Does anyone have any actual evidence of this being the case? Like yes, code would be needed, but why is that innately a bad thing? Bloated data pipelines feels like another hand-wave when I think if you do it right it’s fine. As proven by Waymo. Really curious if any Tesla engineers feel like this is still the best way forward or if it’s just a matter of having to listen to the big guy musk. I’ve always felt that relying on vision only would be a detriment because even humans with good vision get into circumstances where they get hurt because of temporary vision hindrances. Think heavy snow, heavy rain, heavy fog, even just when you crest a hill at a certain time of day and the sun flashes you
    • atonse 8mo ago
      Just for the record though, Musk isn't blindly anti-LIDAR. He has said (and I think this is an objective fact) that all existing roads and driving are based on vision (which is what all humans do). So that should technically be sufficient. SpaceX uses LIDAR for their docking systems. I would argue that yes, we do use vision but we get that "lidar depth" from our stereo vision. And that used to be why I thought cameras weren't enough. But then look at all the work with gaussian splatting (where you can take multiple 2d samples and build a 3d world out of it). So you could probably get 80% there with just that. The ethos of many Musk companies (you'll hear this from many engineers that work there) is simplify, simplify, simplify. If something isn't needed, take it out. Question everything that might be needed. To me, LIDAR is just one of those things in that general pattern of "if it isn't absolutely needed, take it out" – and the fact that FSD works so well without it proves that it isn't required. It's probably a nice to have, but maybe not required.
• leptons 8mo ago
  One camera can't really produce depth/distance information, but two cameras sure can. The eyes in your head don't capture distance information individually, but with two eyes you can infer distance.
  • moogly 8mo ago
    You're forgetting the nervous system and the brain connected to those eyes (and vestibular system).
    • leptons 8mo ago
      Why would you assume I "forgot" about any of that? It's implied. That's what "infer" means in that sentence. Of course it requires a brain and nervous system. Maybe you don't know what the word "infer" means?
      • moogly 8mo ago
        That fake indignation doesn't change the fact that you equated two cameras with two eyes, and if we're going that hard on semantics, you used the word produce for the cameras. > One camera can't really produce depth/distance information, but two cameras sure can.
        • leptons 8mo ago
          This pointless conversation you created is over. If you get your jollies by intentionally misunderstanding comments and pointing out your miscomprehension, then you're talking to the wrong person. I really can't imagine what you think you're getting out of this interaction.
• DoesntMatter22 8mo ago
  It was a great decision to drop LiDAR. The cars are running excellently without it
• uyzstvqs 8mo ago
  It's not that simple. Cameras don't report 3D depth, but these AI models can and do pick up on pictorial depth cues. LiDAR is incredibly valuable for collecting training and validation data, but may also make only an insignificant difference in production inference.
  • pwarner 8mo ago
    Stereo cameras? My 2015 Subaru has them to detect obstacles and it works great.
• pbreit 8mo ago
  All of driving is designed for visual.
  • turtlesdown11 8mo ago
    TIL roads don't have rumble strips
• dzhiurgis 8mo ago
  Certain company has 300k subscribers that rely on that ridiculous service. My father lost vision in 1 eye and 50% in other one something like 20 years ago. He struggles in parking but otherwise doing ok without lidar. Turns out motion vision is more accurate after 10-20 meters than stereoscopic vision.
• DonsDiscountGas 8mo ago
  Humans don't have explicit distance sensors either. When LIDAR sensors were $20k+ I think it made a lot of sense to avoid them.
• NedF 8mo ago
  [dead]
• rustystump 8mo ago
  There are more practical difficulties than just cost. If you have lidar it must be calibrated relative to all other sensors. Bumps in the road, weather, thermals, this all causes drift which is non trivial. Waymos are constantly brought in and recalibrated. The advantage of camera only is you have less moving parts which is not insignificant. But cost isnt the issue as much.