[maxlin]

Yes. They are disallowing themselves from using other sensors. To avoid complicating the software stack and ultimately to keep it higher performing, which will make it safer in any alotted time.

This is really no different from good code practices with a complex system. Most HN readers should be familiar with rot in codebases quite comparable to "adding a few extra features to make it better" which just became a maintenance burden and take away from core features.

If you knew the slightest of how Musk has actually stayed exactly the same since the beginnings of Tesla, you'd know his hard specs are always technology-based. People that know more have said that his capability of speccing systems relatively right deep in to the future is possibly his single greatest leadership feat.

>Once Musk is near-certain about one technology pathway over another, he’s not afraid to put massive amounts of resources into that path, while still staying flexible enough in the case that a new emerging technology disrupts that particular path. Because he’s willing to make enormous (and seemingly risky) bets on these pathways, he’s able to outpace his competitors. https://www.quora.com/Is-Elon-Musk-all-that-hes-cracked-up-t...

[DennisP]

Meanwhile, pretty much everybody else doing safety-critical real-time control prefers multiple sensor types.

For an example of that in self-driving, Huawei uses vision, lidar, radar, and ultrasound. Out of Spec let it drive them around for an hour in busy traffic in a city in China. It looked about as good as FSD, without having had several million cars providing training data for years.