[dheera]

Well yes, but I think they'll be singing a different tune in 5 years, and even more so when more Tesla cars actually start driving in weather conditions less favorable than Palo Alto and Austin.

At some point when LIDAR is cheap enough there is no reason for Elon Musk to not give in and use them. Right now he's constraining the problem to the cost of the car.

[minhazm]

LiDAR is not better in worse weather conditions. LiDAR performance degrades in rain and snow. That’s where something like radar is better. The Tesla get is that humans drive with vision so they should be able to as well. Also every other self driving solution must solve the vision problem also in order to be successful. LiDAR doesn’t tell you that it’s a bag on the road vs a raccoon. So the question is that once you solve the vision problem, do you still need LiDAR for any meaningful impact?

[dheera]

> LiDAR doesn’t tell you that it’s a bag on the road vs a raccoon

I think that's largely an issue with the early LIDAR devices today, but not necessarily what may be to come.

There's something to be said about measuring actual data with solid physics vs. inferring distances with billions of operations on RGB data. If you were landing a commercial aircraft in fog, you most certainly don't rely on your eyes to do most of it, but it is in fact possible to do safely precisely because we do have good sensors on them.

I fully agree with leveraging the scale and maturity of RGB sensors for cars today, the talk is spot on about that, but that's (a) circling back to the fact that Tesla needs to sell cars now not next year and (b) not a good case against use of LIDAR in the future.

[minhazm]

It’s easy to add a few hundred thousand dollars of sensors to a $100 million plane. But $20k on a $40k car is too much and makes it cost prohibitive for most people. If vision alone can get you to say 1 crash in 10 million miles, that’s more than good enough to replace human drivers. If someone decides they want to go the extra mile and will pay for something rated for 1 in 20 million miles for 2x the cost, then they are free to do so.

As mentioned in this talk Tesla is taking an iterative approach and trying to make things safer for people today, not in 5 yrs from now. Maybe in a few years Tesla will see that to go from 10 million miles to 20 million miles they need 4k cameras at 60 fps, but the work they had already done would still have had a big impact. You don’t need to do things in one shot and get to the finish line.

[dheera]

> As mentioned in this talk Tesla is taking an iterative approach

> You don’t need to do things in one shot and get to the finish line.

I think we agree on these things. I wasn't trying to dispute their approach, rather explain their rationale for their current method, which is focused at actually selling product now.

> But $20k on a $40k car is too much

Those sensors don't need to be 20K-40K, they just aren't mass produced yet. That's why I think Elon Musk will change his tune in some years when those sensors are 1/100 the cost and 10X more accurate than vision.