[ajross]

To be fair, though: Elon is shipping actual vehicles. I mean, I think the GM and Waymo offerings look great too, but I can't buy one. Even granting the premise that LiDAR is going to be a firm requirement, it's not clear to me that Tesla is actually behind the curve on real products. Adding a LiDAR system (or buying one from Waymo) to a Tesla seems naively simpler than finishing and shipping a whole new system from scratch.

[nguoi]

Shipping vehicles has been a solved problem for a century, shipping autonomous vehicles has not. Although they are taking the money for it, Tesla are not shipping autonomous vehicles.

[navigatesol]

>Elon is shipping actual vehicles. I mean, I think the GM and Waymo offerings look great too, but I can't buy one.

GM is shipping millions of cars annually, with the same FSD capability as any Tesla on the road. That is: zero FSD capability.

[Animats]

Right. All the major automakers have Level 2 capability now - lane keeping and auto-braking in traffic, plus maybe some extra stuff like auto-park or lane change. That's all Tesla's "autopilot", as shipped, does.

[michaelt]

In that situation, what do you think would happen to customers who've paid $6000 for the 'Full Self-Driving Capability' ?

[Faark]

They get the upgrade for free, I'd hope? Kind of like they seem to feel the need to do regarding their new chip [0].

Less optimistic, people will probably be less eager to upgrade once those cars are several generations old by the point FSD will actually be available.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/8/20685873/tesla-fsd-chip-up...

[gambiting]

Well the problem is that as I understand it you need to get the FSD package right now to get the current advanced cruise control, which is kind of the party trick of a Tesla and a reason why I'd want one(that and the whole electric drive thing I guess).

[jjeaff]

And is the full self driving promise attached to the vehicle or the purchaser? In other words, if full self driving actually happens in 10 years, will the only people able to collect be original purchasers that still have that original car?

Seems like a great bet for Tesla either way. If they get to self driving soon, they'll make a mint and upgrading or even fully replacing those cars will be a drop in the bucket. If it takes them a decade, there probably won't be that many still around to make a claim.

[asdkhadsj]

It does make me sad that Tesla didn't just throw all the (affordable?) tech they could into their cars, and then figure it out later.

Eg, it seems like they are taking the "figure it out later" approach, but they limited what they can work with to just camera information. Which to me is a shame. I'd like to see Tesla's model with lots of inputs.

Then again, I don't ship these cars, so I'm probably being ignorant :)

[MrOwen]

To be fair, it seems like there's been a lot of innovation and miniaturization in the LIDAR space in the past year or two. Even if Tesla wanted to preemptively install LIDAR for future proofing, I'm guessing that addition to the car would be an eye sore.

[Animats]

There are lots of LIDAR startups. And there's Continental, the big European auto parts maker. They bought Advanced Scientific Concepts, which has a good but expensive flash LIDAR. (I saw the prototype on an optical bench 15 years ago.) They showed a prototype on a car in 2017.[1]

There are about 100 companies involved with automotive LIDAR.[2] Making LIDAR units cheaper looks within reach. Arguments are over which technology of several that work will be cheapest. Not whether it can be done. There are the rotating machinery guys. The flash LIDAR guys, divided into the "we can make CMOS do it" and "we can get InGaAs fabbed at reasonable cost" camps. There are the MEMS mirror people. All have working demo units.

But no car maker is prepared to order in quantity. Continental is an auto parts maker - when some auto manufacturer wants to order a few hundred thousand units, they'll crank up a production line and get the price down. There's no demand yet beyond the prototype level. The startups mostly want to get bought out by someone who can manufacture in volume. In the end, it's an auto part.

Once the units get cheaper, they can be better integrated into cars. The top 2cm or so of the windshield can be dedicated to sensors. Additional sensors near the headlights, looking sideways from the fenders, and backwards will complete the circle. The top-mounted rotating thing is a temporary measure until the price comes down.

[1] https://www.continental-automotive.com/en-gl/Landing-Pages/C...

[2] http://www.automotivelidar.com/

[m463]

> Tesla didn't just throw all the (affordable?) tech they could into their cars

But they did. Since the late 2016 model S, each tesla comes with 1 radar unit, 8 cameras, 12 ultrasonic sensors and a replacable computer system.

At the start, these were not all used, but they have been used for more functions over time.

The model X got the same cameras, and my friend who has one said his car uses the side cameras to prevent the self-opening driver and passenger doors from dinging nearby cars.

They've designed a new faster computer (Hardware 3.0). The folks who paid for full self driving will get one of these swapped in when full self driving features require it.