[joakleaf]

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.

[foxtr0t]

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.