[pkAbstract]

Lidar would increase car cost so much that most people would die of sticker shock. The strongest candidate for proving lidar AV tech is Waymo, which to me means it has a relatively low chance in the consumer space in the 2020s; and unit cost needs to come down dramatically. The cost and complexity starts making more sense in vehicles with very high uptime.

In addition to being prohibitively expensive, lidar units are large, ugly, have moving parts (which should worry any engineer), and increase drag.

Tesla's current Autopilot tech is a bet on the promise of computer vision, and the intuition that if sight is good enough for humans, it's good enough for Autopilot. I think it's a smart bet.

[kgin]

That was true when Tesla wanted to start selling “fsd-ready” cars, but it’s getting cheaper all the time. Luminar has $500 lidar, Huawei says they’ll be selling $100 sensors soon.