My own prediction based on the fact that almost all other AV programs are using LIDAR, costs are decreasing with scale /R&D, and Teslas localization looks shotty at best. As costs continue to drop, its going to be tough for the company to continue rationalize sticking with cameras only just to keep Elon's ego in tact.
In a safety critical system, I don't like hearing "we don't need x, we can get by with just y". I like redundant systems, especially when one may do better in certain conditions than the other.
I was actually in the "pro lidar" camp, until I saw the user uploaded youtube videos of the Tesla beta FSD released last week in action.
Now I am not so sure anymore.
Looking at the beta UI in the car while it is driving, I am impressed with how well it detects everything. There are examples in dark and even areas with leafs covering parts of an unmarked road. It doesn't look at all like the detection system is struggling.
The only thing is, that things seem to "float" a bit, or cars and pedestrians disappears when going behind other cars and reappears again on the other side. The sides of the road also seems to float/shift a little bit from time to time.
I wonder if they are not using a temporal filter of some sort (like assume a car continues in the same trajectory when goes behind another object), or if the UI only displays an "unfiltered" value.
In any case, I still haven't seen examples where the cameras didn't pick up anything relevant/critical.
Object detection is mostly solved though, right? I don't think anyone is advocating using LiDAR for detection. It is used to accurately model depth and then localize the vehicle and surrounding objects/vehicles. The "floating" phenomenon you're talking about is noise from the computation method(s) Tesla uses to build a composite 3D model. You can fix that with LiDAR. I'd wager this noise gets worse in some circumstances. You can try to fix it by piling on noise reduction methods, but at a certain point, one has to wonder when it becomes obvious that an extra $X/vehicle to make the problem go away forever makes sense, where X is a monotonically decreasing value that'll probably get down to ~$200 with scale/R&D.
> Hey, Elon, a question on LIDAR. If LIDAR were totally free, would you want to use it in your cars near term? Would that tech significantly help Tesla on the training of your neural network for FSD?
> I mean totally free, well, I think probably — I think even if it was free, we wouldn't put it on.
My guess is that there is so much technical debt that adding LIDAR is a tough choice for TESLA. They would need to throw out all the visual only data they have to-date and start over.
Any idea what Apple's LIDAR specs are? Just saying that if the sample rate is only supposed to be good enough for auto-focusing a camera every second within a 10-20 degree FOV on-center, then there's still a deal of improvement needed before they can be used for self-driving cars. I think the tech will get there eventually, but this is an area where the sensor specs become really important.